{"id":6959,"date":"2012-05-08T13:12:34","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T13:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=6959"},"modified":"2012-05-08T13:12:34","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T13:12:34","slug":"nadsat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=6959","title":{"rendered":"Nadsat"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day I saw a play based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange<\/em>, which was linguistically interesting. When I read the book many years ago I was able to guess the meanings of most of the Nadsat words from the context – Nadsat is the form of speech used by some characters in the book which combines English with a lot of slang words, most of which come from Russian and are given English spellings and pronunciations. At that time I didn’t know any Russian, so none of the words sounded familiar. <\/p>\n

Now I do know a bit of Russian and found that I knew the meanings of quite a few of the Nadsat words borrowed from Russian, though it took me quite a while to recognise some of them. The word horrorshow<\/em>, for example, is used frequently but it wasn’t until near the end of the play that I realised that it was a version of \u0445\u043e\u0440\u043e\u0448\u043e<\/em> (khoro\u0161o = good). <\/p>\n

Other Russian loanwords I recognised include:<\/p>\n

– droog = \u0434\u0440\u0443\u0433 (drug) – friend
\n– bratty = \u0431\u0440\u0430\u0442 (brat) – brother
\n– goloss = \u0433\u043e\u043b\u043e\u0441 (golos) – voice
\n– govoreet = \u0433\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0440\u0438\u0442\u044c (govorit’) – speak
\n– malchick = \u043c\u0430\u043b\u044c\u0447\u0438\u043a (mal’\u010dik) – boy
\n– millicent = \u043c\u0438\u043b\u0438\u0446\u0438\u044f (militsija) – police
\n– noga = \u043d\u043e\u0433\u0430 (noga) – foot
\n– slovo = \u0441\u043b\u043e\u0432\u043e (slovo) – word
\n– slooshy = \u0441\u043b\u0443\u0448\u0430\u0442\u044c (slu\u0161at’) – to listen, hear
\n– yahzick = \u044f\u0437\u044b\u043a (yazyk) – tongue<\/p>\n

Here’s a Nadsat dictionary<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day I saw a play based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, which was linguistically interesting. When I read the book many years ago I was able to guess the meanings of most of the Nadsat words from the context – Nadsat is the form of speech used by some characters in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-russian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}